Colorado country: A look at the music’s Mile High popularity from Seven Peaks and Country Jam festivals to the Grizzly Rose

Tim McGraw poses for a selfie with fans while performing during his Shotgun Rider Tour at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre on September 9, 2015. (Daniel Petty, The Denver Post)

Tim McGraw, Brooks & Dunn, Rascal Flatts. For the last 30 years, Brian O’Connell, Live Nation’s head of country touring, has steered some of the genre’s biggest shows around America. During that stretch, there’s one city that is guaranteed a visit at least once a year.

“When you route a tour, you figure out where and when are you going to play Denver,” O’Connell said. “It’s a strong country market. It always has been.”

While the Denver area has recently come into its own as a mecca for pop concerts, country music has ridden a steady wave of popularity for far longer. The radio dial could tell you that: Country station KYGO still routinely nabs a top-three share of the Denver-Boulder market, according to Nielsen. But now, with a burgeoning underground scene and a brand-spanking-new blockbuster country festival in the Seven Peaks Music Festival, coming to the area this summer, country could be primed for a renaissance here.

Festival promoters are zeroing in on that buzz. Take this year’s inaugural Seven Peaks Music Festival, a three-day hootenanny (Aug. 31-Sept. 2) put on by O’Connell and country superstar Dierks Bentley on a ranch in Buena Vista. For all O’Connell talked about the area, he’s putting his money where his mouth is with Seven Peaks. The 30,000-person event has already made a big splash this summer in the country community — Bentley’s gravity has pulled in top-tier acts like Miranda Lambert, Brothers Osborne and Clint Black. But O’Connell is angling to make the event a national destination for anyone in search of a Labor Day weekend tradition.

“In the United States, everything is so red and blue right now,” O’Connell said. “But we’re red, white and blue. We’re everybody. If you like it, come on in.”

Seven Peaks joins the company of a long-standing country party in the state: Country Jam, which has been shaking the grass on the Western Slope since 1992. Last year, the festival — which advertises itself as “the biggest party in Colorado” — drew 92,000 fans, according to a representative from Town Square Media, which purchased the festival in 2013.

Of course, you don’t have to leave Denver to dip your foot into the stream of country music. The Cowboy Lounge downtown is a country-music club with a rooftop patio and sleek bar, adding a coat of varnish to the genre’s rough-hewn image.

But the beating heart of the scene lies along a frontage road off Interstate 25. There, the Grizzly Rose, a neon-bathed Denver staple, is closing in on its 30th year as the city’s veritable cowboy hat. As thousands pass through its heavy doors every week for the party du jour — line dancing on Wednesdays, ladies’ night on Thursdays and big shows on Fridays — the venue has achieved an almost legendary status.

Since the mid-1990s, artists have quite literally sung its praises. In 2016, Denver country band Buckstein wrote an entire song about the venue. Superstars like Garth Brooks and Kenny Chesney, the latter of whom plays Sports Authority Field on June 30, have also venerated the club in their lyrics — curiously, both slant-rhyme the club’s name with “the code of the road,” shorthand for “what happens on tour stays on tour.”

Like the genre itself, country bars are often stereotyped. Films like “Road House” painted a picture of the country bar as a xenophobic fight club, where mullet-laden drunks wield pool cues like martial artists and a chicken wire fence protects the stage from beer bottle barrages.

The Grizzly Rose has kicked that typecast, rising into a community pillar by keeping its facilities updated (it renovated much of its 40,000-square-foot expanse, including the bathrooms and facade, last year) and hosting family-friendly all-ages nights on Sundays. In that way, it grows its own crowd.

Grizzly Rose general manager Lindy Arnold, 42, first came to the venue with her parents when she was 15.

“Twenty years ago, ‘Road House’ is kind of what bars were,” Arnold said 42. “It doesn’t happen anymore. We’re safe and comfortable for all walks of life. It’s not just a bar where you come in and it’s just jeans and cowboy hats.”

The storied Grizzy Rose. (Dylan Owens, Special to The Know)

Although, there’s that, too. On Wednesdays, you can usually find Johno Roberts on the floor. Speckled with tattoos, Roberts, 33, is the frontman of underground Denver country band Hang Rounders, a burgeoning old-school act that stands in sharp contrast to the sheen of today’s pop country.

Hailing from Nashville, Tenn., Roberts came to the city after a long road of busking and intermittently riding the rails throughout his teens. Country music came naturally to him because he’s been steeped in it: Not only did he grow up in Nashville, but his family was also friends with Little Jimmy Dickens, a singer-songwriter worthy of the city’s rhinestone royalty.

At 13, around the same time his mother started bringing him to the honky-tonk bar she worked at in Nashville, Roberts picked up the guitar. When he left Nashville, he landed in a laundromat in the small city of Murfreesboro, busking on street corners to earn his keep.

Coming to Denver in 2005 changed his fortunes. Roberts lived in his car for a few months, saving up the money he earned as a bicycle messenger before moving into a DIY collective called The Pitchfork in Five Points. Curtis Wallach, currently a talent buyer at Denver rock club the Hi-Dive, lived nearby and befriended Roberts, eventually offering him a job at the since-closed Denver bicycle shop The Track Shack, which Wallach owned.

Wallach offered to record some of Roberts’ songs. After hearing his sound, Wallach proposed they form a band in 2013, and the Hang Rounders was born.

Denver’s country scene took Johno Roberts’ music career from the street corner to a sold-out show at the Boulder Theater. (Dylan Owens, Special to The Know)

“He was the only guy I knew that could sing country songs and had time for a band,” Wallach said. “That’s not to discount how good he is, though. He’s not trying to prove himself to anybody, just is what he is.”

“There is real music that comes out of Nashville, but a lot of it is really fake,” Roberts said, referencing the city’s machine of producers and songwriters for hire. “In Denver, it’s a genuine close-knit group of people, and it’s very versatile — you get a lot of weird throwback stuff, Graham Parsons stuff mixed with jam, purists. It’s a good mix.”

Roberts was impressed with the size of the underground country scene in Denver.

“Those (Nashville) bands are more successful because it’s easier to do there. Here, it’s nine hours to the next city.”

Despite that disadvantage, the Hang Rounders have made big strides in the past year. According to Mike Harmeier, frontman of the road warrior country band Mike and the Moonpies, the Hang Rounders are on the radar in Austin, independent country’s holy city.

“They’re really getting around,” Harmeier said, calling on the way to one of the 250 shows that the Moonpies will play this year.

The buzz might have started with 2017’s “Out of Beer, Out of Here,” the band’s sophomore effort. Recorded at famed Nashville recording studio The Bomb Shelter, the album simmers between traditional beery-eyed boot-stompers to achingly honest ballads. For example, “McCrory Lane,” the album’s closer, includes this verse: “I pointed that pistol at the ground where Daddy lay / I let it bark and said what I needed to say.”

The song isn’t a metaphor or even hyperbole. Roberts’ father died when Roberts was 16, and spent nearly all of his son’s life before that in jail. Three years ago, Roberts visited his father’s grave for the first time and shot it repeatedly with a pistol. The police arrested him soon after.

“They charged me with reckless discharge of a firearm, but it wasn’t really that reckless,” Roberts said. “I was so torn between ‘I hate this person, but he’s my dad.’ ”

Roberts’ cry has resonated far further than the Tennessee pines. “Outta Beer, Outta Here” lifted the band onto the pages of Country Music People — a 50-year-old country music magazine based in England — and earlier this month, in front of a sold-out Boulder Theater, where the band opened for Reckless Kelly. They’re even starting to get recognized around Texas, a place where country is just called “music.”

“Whenever I’m there, people ask me whether I’m in the Hang Rounders,” Roberts said. “I’m like, ‘How do you know this band?!’ People say, ‘Well, you’re from Denver. It’s kind of known for country music.’ ”

Lady Antebellum will make its Red Rocks debut as part of SeriesFest. (Capitol Records Nashville)

Dylan Owens is a Denver-based writer and former music critic for The Denver Post. He listens exclusively to your favorite band and takes great comfort in the fact that at any given point, “Road House” is on TV somewhere.